Guess who’s not coming to dinner?

An estimated 3,500 or more earnest Dean ground troops were in the corn-belt state last week, during the cold heart of winter, for a precinct-by-precinct effort to turn on and turn out Dean voters. They were known as “The Perfect Storm,” or, among journalists on the trail, as “the orange hats.” Bright with the light of common faith, that volunteer corps was supposed to provide Dean with the margin of his success. No other campaign could match those numbers or that degree of commitment, the pundits said.

But it didn’t work.

Maybe it’s unfair to blame the hats, but put yourself in the boots of an average Iowa Democrat a few days before the caucus. The campaign is so intense that it has become a form of political harassment. Your phone rings every 10 minutes with an automated robo-call on behalf of one candidate or another. Your mailbox is jammed with political junk mail. Then comes a knock on your door and there you find a couple of committed campaigners from Park Slope or Noe Valley or Wicker Park telling you that Howard Dean is your man. And they’re wearing these really loud orange caps.

How would you react if a bunch of Iowans invaded your neighborhood like that? Now you’re beginning to understand what might’ve happened to Dean on Monday....In the aftermath, I can’t help but think the Dean-ites came off as a little precious, maybe even a little bit cultish, in those caps. What was the point? Were they trying to impress Iowans with the size of their army? Were they a subtle, ironic comment on the presumed nerdiness of the locals? Were they an expression of uncritical devotion to the higher political cause? Inevitably, the choice of headwear set the volunteers apart, and not in a good way. It made them stand out, much as saffron robes make a Hare Krishna devotee stand out at an airport. And “The Perfect Storm” imagery? Someone should have told Dean: In the Midwest, when the weather turns violent, sensible people get away from windows and doors and head for the basement to wait it out.

DES MOINES, Iowa—"Prove it or not," Howard Dean told his supporters at a rally Sunday in Davenport. "Now is the time to see if this works," to see if the unorthodox, Internet-fueled campaign assembled by Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, translates into votes. "Tomorrow, at 6:30 p.m., you can prove it or not." The answer Iowans gave him was a raspberry: Or not.

I attended a West Des Moines caucus Monday night with Dean's Iowa press secretary, Sarah Leonard, and her feeling about the race was that it would be close, so close perhaps that they wouldn't be able to call it that night. She felt it was a three-way race, between Dean, Kerry, and Gephardt. "Edwards, I just don't think you can build an organization in 48 hours," she said. But it wasn't close. Momentum beat organization, both Dean's digital one and Gephardt's analog one. (Leonard did say before the caucus, however, that the rumor that Dean had a hard count of 50,000 was preposterous. "If we had a hard count of 50,000, I'd probably be at the Val Air," she joked, referring to the ballroom site of Dean's caucus night party.)

The results from our caucus reflected the results of the 1,992 other caucuses in the state in one respect: Kerry got twice as many delegates as Howard Dean, four to two (with John Edwards picking up four as well). There were lots of new and first-time caucus participants, so many that the organizers ran out of forms to register them. But they weren't the new voters the Dean campaign wanted. George Davey, the precinct captain for the Dean campaign, said he was hoping for 25 to 50 Dean voters between the ages of 18 and 25, but only one showed up. "I think if we could blame [Dean's loss] on anyone, blame it on the 18- to 25-year-olds, because they were nonexistent," he said.

Davey, who is 37, also said Dean needed to be less negative toward his opponents. And another Dean volunteer, Toby Sackton, a 57-year-old from Boston, complained that Dean's television ads weren't any good. "We saw three ads, one by Kerry, one by Edwards, and one by Dean. Dean's was by far the worst," he said. "It was an ad aimed at getting the supporters out," not appealing to voters who didn't already like Dean....